Celestia

A pluggable consensus and data availability layer. Makes deploying a blockchain easy.

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on:
• Testnet release: had their Devnet release in H2 of 2021, testnet planned in 2022 (3-1-2022) Update: first testnet launched on 25-5-2022.
• Mainnet release: Planned (3-1-2022) in 2022

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Token

Other Details

• From its FAQ (3-1-2022):

"Celestia will have a token that will be used to secure the network via Proof of Stake, and to pay for transaction fees on the network. We plan to implement a fee-burn mechanism similar to EIP-1559 in Ethereum so that burnt fees will offset new token issuance as Celestia gains adoption."

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Built on: its own layer.
• Programming language used:
• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Celestia will support all flavors of rollups, but we are initially focused on the EVM and Cosmos SDK."

• Acoording to this thread (3-1-2022): Smart contracts can choose execution environment.

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From Analyst DAO (22-4-2022):

"Celestia node receives rollup transaction (rollup transaction is submitted by a rollup node)

1. Celestia node ensures appropriate fees were paid
2. Nodes order the data (ie produce some sort of time sequencing for the TXs)
3. Attest to the data by collectively signing off on the block’s integrity
4. Compartmentalize the data based on a DNS mapping that corresponds to a particular rollup that plugs into Celestia  

And that’s it! Just receive transactions, and order them into blocks. Unironically, Celestia was previously called Lazy Ledger before rebranding, a nod to the intentionally minimal functionality that the protocol affords.

One of the interesting properties of Celestia is the versatility it affords for execution. As demonstrated above, Celestia provides a protocol for ordering transactions into some sort of time sequencing, then applying consensus to these transactions. While seemingly trivial, its importance cannot be understated.  Now that we have a) a group of transactions within the block b) a collective view on the order in which these transactions appeared, any rollup node can apply transactions to its initial state in the ordering format as produced by Celestia, and compute the new state.

To stress this point further, the Celestia protocol is completely blind to the data within the transactions they are putting into blocks. It’s the rollup’s job to figure out how they want to interpret the data embedded within these transactions (i.e. the rollup themselves establish protocol rules).

There are two ways in which these rollups can configure their architecture to plug into Celestia:

1)      Sovereign Rollups

2)      Settlement Enforced Rollups (CEVMOS, Celestiums, etc)"

• Acoording to this thread (3-1-2022):

Anyone is allowed to post anything on chain (even invalid transactions). Nodes will download the transactions compute state of chain locally. Here is where data availability proofs comes to play. It ensures coding and it will download a few random pieces that can confirm whether a transaction is valid. This happens irrespective of how high the block is.

• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Celestia is a minimal blockchain that only orders and publishes transactions and does not execute them. By decoupling the consensus and application execution layers, Celestia modularizes the blockchain technology stack and unlocks new possibilities for decentralized application builders."

• From Ansem's Q1 report (1-1-2022):

"They are building a blockchain dedicated to being the most efficient and decentralized data-availability layer and will be able to connect to other execution and settlement layers to complete the full modular stack. Since Celestia is only focused on data availability and ordering transactions, their methods for block verification can be simplified with data availability proofs. Essentially, each node in the network is required to sample a small piece of each block to confirm its’ validity and through this collective sampling the network comes to consensus. Because of this, as more nodes are added to the network, it actually increases the throughput of the entire system so the network benefits from being as decentralized as possible."

Scaling

• From its website (3-1-2022):

"Because Celestia does not validate transactions, its throughput is not bottlenecked by state execution like traditional blockchains. Thanks to a property of data availability proofs, Celestia’s throughput scales with the number of users."

• From its FAQ (3-1-2022):

"Celestia is able to scale as the number of users (light nodes) in the network increases. Celestia remains secure so long as there are enough nodes on the network to sample the entire block. This means that as more nodes join the network and sample, the block size can increase accordingly without sacrificing security or decentralization. Doing so on a traditional blockchain would sacrifice decentralization because a bigger block size would create a larger hardware requirement for nodes to download and verify data. Rollups also depend on data availability for their scalability, so better scaling potential for Celestia will also translate to better scaling potential for the rollups utilizing Celestia."

Their Other Projects

CEVmos

• From Citadel One (1-3-2022):

"In December 2021, Evmos announced a partnership with Celestia to build CEvmos, Celestia-EVM on Cosmos. Celestia is a layer 1 built to handle data availability and settlement but not execution, allowing devs to utilize their own execution environment and using Celestia’s data availability and security.

CEVMos utilizes Celestia and EVMos to create a modular stack: EVMos for settlement, Celestia for data availability."

Roadmap

• Can be found here (3-1-2022).

Competition

• Has similarities with Cosmos and Polkadot, however within Celestia, its chains do not inherit the security of the main chain.

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Mustafa Al-Bassam, self-proclaimed co-founder of LulzSec

Advisors

• Zaki Manian — Co-creator of IBC and early Cosmos contributor
• Ethan Buchman — Co-founder of Tendermint and Co-founder of Cosmos
• Morgan Beller — General Partner at NFX and Co-creator of Diem≋ (fka Libra)
• Nick White — Co-founder of Harmony
• James Prestwich — Founder of Summa (acquired by Celo)
• George Danezis — Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at University College London

Funding

• Celestia Labs closed a $1.5m seed fundraise (3-3-2021) from Interchain Foundation, Binance Labs, Maven 11 Capital, KR1, and others

===Partners===*From this thread (9-2-2022): "In mid‐Dec. 2021, EVMos announced partnership with Celestia to build modular tech stack for EVM dApps; it will be rollup centric at the execution layer ‐ Data availability: Celestia ‐ Settlement: EVMos EVM ‐ Execution: rollups (zk‐RU or optimistic RU)"